A TRAIN COMES INTO THE STATION.
You wake up on a train.
Your phone is buzzing. It's in your pocket, in your hand, on the seat next to you. It's a normal phone, and you're on a normal train car. One of the lights flickers, a little further down. The world is very quiet. It feels like you're right where you're meant to be. On the phone's surface is a white screen and the words—
WELCOME TO THE CITY. BEGIN ORIENTATION?
▶ NO
Please take a moment to complete your orientation.
Once you're finished, the subway doors slide open to let you out onto the train platform. To your right, the platform continues on and eventually ends; to the left is a set of stairs that will lead you up into the station itself. The platform is quiet, clean, empty–there's no one else around, and the only sounds you can hear are your own footsteps, your own breaths, and the occasional faraway sound of a creaking pipe or rush of air. The train you disembarked will stay there as long as you do, its doors still open, until you finally decide to venture up into this new locale.
As you make your way up the stairs to your left, you find yourself in the belly of City Hall station. The station is large, a sprawling underground mini-metropolis of corridors and storefronts. Here, you may find others like you, freshly-arrived city residents from other realms (or even your own). There is also a subway map, which will give you an idea of the layout of the neighborhood, and ticketing machines, which can currently only be used to buy tickets to a handful of stations located on lines 1, 2, and 9.
If you're hungry or in need of any kind of supplies, there are plenty of storefronts inside the subway station as well—snack stands, convenience stores, restaurants, clothing stores, a pharmacy, and a variety of empty shops that may or may not have ever been in use. Everything is unlocked, and you can take whatever you need.
Characters may stay on the train platform indefinitely, and may re-board and re-disembark from the subway as many times as they like, but the train will not depart nor will the doors close. Once they go up the stairs into the train station, they may hear the train doors closing and the train departing. Another train will not arrive, no matter how long the character waits. Only once they come up the stairs into the station itself may characters encounter their fellow newly-arrived residents and take advantage of what the city has to offer.
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WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
The station is located in the city center. It has three major exits that lead to areas of interest in the district, but there are several other smaller exits that lead in other directions around the neighborhood. You are welcome to use any of them, but may find the north, southwest, and east exits to be the most welcoming.
TO THE NORTH
The northern entrance to the station leads up into the sunlight and puts you out in a brickwork plaza. There's a modest building in front of you, three or four stories of stone with a welcoming facade. There's a sign above the entryway–it says City Hall. You may be tempted to explore, if you're interested in learning more about the city and how it functions, but prepare to find yourself disappointed–the folders in the records rooms are full of empty, blank sheets of paper, and the logbooks and balance sheets are similarly devoid of information.
Immediately to the west of City Hall, you will find a small building that houses the tourist information kiosk. The kiosk is not currently operational, but you may want to remember its location...
TO THE SOUTHWEST
The western exit of the station takes you up into a city park, lush and green with a very light fog still hanging about the trees. There are lampposts on the walkways and benches where you could rest, and plenty of flora, although you can neither see nor hear any signs of animal life. You walk the paths that meander idly through the verdant grass and you feel a sense of peace, some of your unease about this place easing into a pleasant calm. The air smells fresh, like it's recently rained, and you'll find the grass ever so slightly damp should you decide to take a seat.
As you make your way deeper into the park, the trees grow denser and the smell of soil and plant life grows stronger. This is the older part of the park, very nearly a forest, with ivy climbing the trunks of the trees and plants and shrubs growing riotously around their bases. As you turn a corner, you find yourself first in the statue garden, although the statues are harder to see now, choked as they are with ivy. There are many statues, some partially obscured, some fully–very few of them still stand free of the vines and clinging roots. (It doesn't feel quite as peaceful here.) If a statue's face looks a little bit familiar, you may not want to look at it too long.
Continue down the path and you will find yourself in a graveyard, one that seems centuries old. Most of the headstones are worn away by time and covered in moss, rendering them impossible to read. The few that are free of moss are blank, or bear only suggestions of names too faint to be understood. (Was that the name of–no, it couldn't have been. Could it?) Many of the headstones stand at an angle or are toppled over completely, having been subjected to either strong winds or the roots of the trees that grow up from some of the graves, spreading branches toward the sky.
TO THE EAST
The final exit of the station, to the east, puts you out on a quiet surface street. Are you hungry? Or are you paralyzed by choice? There are plenty of restaurants, offering options of almost any food you can imagine. You could try a convenience store–it's well stocked, and the items there seem free for the taking. How about a restaurant? There's no one to take your order, but when you look in the kitchen, there's something on the stove, and it's just what you've been craving. Imagine that.
A few blocks down, you come in through the lobby of a tall building and find yourself in a corporate office. The fluorescent lights are steady and unforgiving, and the cubicles and offices are empty. There are a few pieces of paper on desks, a few folders left in organizers, but everything is perfectly blank. Despite how empty and quiet the office is, it nonetheless gives you the feeling that just a few minutes ago, this place was bustling with workers going about their daily business.
You enter another building and find yourself in the lobby of an apartment complex–finally, a place to rest. The first door you try opens easily into a completely empty living room, freshly vacuumed but without a single piece of furniture. It's a nice apartment, quiet, but with a little too much echo for your taste, maybe. Still, and perhaps oddly, you have no trouble envisioning what life here would be like.
The second door you open leads to an apartment that feels lived-in. Why does it feel lived-in? It's fully furnished with items that seem to go together perfectly, true, but the feeling is more than that–the room feels like someone was just here, maybe standing right in the kitchen only moments before you swung the door open. The air is a perfectly comfortable temperature, and it somehow smells like home despite that you've never once set foot here before. The refrigerator is stocked, and the cabinets are full of spices and flatware and kitchen utensils.
As you look around the living room, you find that there are pictures in frames on the walls and some of the flat surfaces–a seascape, a field, a shot of a city park bench. In each of the photos there's something just slightly wrong with the angle, as though the photographer were aiming for a subject that can no longer be seen.
Characters are welcome to explore the district around the City Hall subway station to their heart's content. The City Hall building itself contains several floors of offices and file rooms, but none of them contain any particularly interesting information. Nonetheless, characters may wish to team up with other newcomers and try to find some hints about the nature of the city. They can also spend a while in the park, the statue garden, or the graveyard. In the blocks surrounding the station there are plenty of options for food and housing, as well as office buildings, storefronts, and alleyways to look around. There are no workers in any of the buildings, and there does not seem to be an honor system for payment, nor any consequences for taking food from the stores or setting up camp in an apartment or office building.
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A WASH, ANYONE?
The coin laundromat is tucked into the first floor of one of the tall apartment buildings. Soap is complimentary, and while the machines say that they cost a quarter per load, in reality they are fully operational without any money being exchanged at all. If you have any clothes that need a wash, perhaps items that have been dirtied by your explorations (or your travels before arriving in the city), you may want to take this opportunity to wash them for free.
From the soap dispenser, you can retrieve packets of detergent in different strengths. There's plenty of stock of for mild to moderate grime and for heavy-duty stains, but there are also a handful of packets with slightly less obvious purposes. For things remembered, says one. For unhappy accidents, says another. Feel free to use whichever seems most suited to your needs.
When your laundry cycle has ended, the buzzer sounds and the door pops open so the clothing can be retrieved. You grab a laundry basket and reach in to start pulling fabric out of the machine by the handful. But wait a second–the more clothing you retrieve, the less familiar the items seem, and by the time you've retrieved the last bundled sock from the depths of the dryer you're absolutely positive: These clothes don't belong to you.
You're sure that you put your own clothing into the machine, but these are someone else's clothes entirely. Did someone sneak in while you weren't paying attention and swap out your laundry? Or did you accidentally open up the wrong dryer to retrieve the wrong load? Maybe you'd better look around at whoever else is in the laundromat with you and have a go at trying to find the owner of these clothes.
Whether the characters have had their clothing swapped or simply opened the wrong machine to grab someone else's laundry is up to the player's imagination, but one thing's for sure: you have someone else's clothes in your basket. Maybe these are clothes that belong to another character in the laundromat, or maybe they're garments that belong to someone that character knew back home. Players are encouraged to mess around with the premise and use it to get to know other characters!
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COME ONE, COME ALL...
Have you ever noticed that flickering sign hanging in the window of that little building around the corner from the parking lot? The one that says PSYCHIC READINGS in bold neon lettering?
You step inside the shop and immediately smell a powerful combination of aromas: herbs, candles, incense, something spicy and warm underneath. It's a small space, cluttered with objects. A crystal ball covered in velvet sits in the center of a table, and there are tarot card sets and drawers full of dried herbs and flowers. On the shelves are various remedies with labels printed so neatly it's impossible to tell whether they're typed or handwritten. Headaches, or hemophilia, and also irascibility and fits of sighing. There are also jars full of less easily-identifiable contents, but a close examination may show you frog legs, fish eyes, rat tails. For some reason, it feels like sticking your hand in one of these jars might not be the best idea.
Toward the back of the shop is a glass case that holds the bust of a woman. As you approach, your movement triggers a light inside the case to illuminate the woman's face–or where her face would be, if she had one. The normal human features of her face are smoothed out until they barely resemble a face at all, with slightly hollowed divots for eyes and a faintly raised bump for a nose. The closer you get, though, the more strongly you feel that despite the absence of eyes, the woman is indeed watching you.
The lettering at the top of the case states FORTUNE TELLER, and a sign affixed to the front of the glass says, Ask for anything, but be careful what you wish for.
You form a question in your mind, then ask your question out loud. The woman shifts, straightening up, and you hear the faint whirring of clockwork and pneumatics moving inside her. She gathers her hands in front of her, cupping them like she's holding water, and strange light emanates from her palms, casting harsh illumination on the blank space where her face should be. Although she has no mouth with which to speak, you nonetheless hear a vaguely female voice intone, "Your fate has been read."
A paper slip emerges from a slot in the front of the case, your freshly-printed fortune, the ink barely dry.
Although the crystal ball will not actually show the future, characters with any kind of herbal knowledge may clock that the herbs and remedies in the drawers and shelves of the shop are legitimate. Characters can ask anything they want of the fortune teller, or make as many wishes as they like. They'll get as many fortune slips as correspond to the number of questions they ask. Players are encouraged to come up with whatever vaguely-accurate fortunes you think work for your character, but if you're low on ideas, you can always try an online Magic 8 Ball or fortune cookie generator.
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WILDCARD.
The city is by no means small, and there are plenty of things for you to see. There's no rush in exploring, so feel free to take your time looking around and peering into various nooks and crannies and alleyways—and don't worry, you're not very likely to find anything peering back.
If none of the above prompts appeal, feel free to check out the Locations and Maps pages and write your own freestyle prompt using one or many of the available locations.
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citycenter) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2023-06-01 12:00 am
A train comes into the station
There isn't one.
People arrive seemingly at random intervals. Not that he's approached any of them yet. And, as none of them have approached him in turn he's spent his time quite quietly exploring on his own. That all changes when someone finally approaches him. Which is fine, he'd heard the footsteps approaching even if he'd been unable to feel them. Only, when he's greeted with politeness and a question, he's taken off guard. That's not at all the sort of interaction he'd been bracing for.]
A bookstore? There's a small newsstand here in the station that seemingly stocks a variety of newspapers, magazines, and what look to be books.
[He continues on, not wanting to get this stranger's hopes up if he's hoping to find useful intelligence there.]
I should warn you that they're all blank. You won't find anything in them. I've checked.
no subject
Drat! That's unfortunate.
[ This just means he will have to invest his time focusing on what is transpiring here within this city; although he had some hope that information could be found within the pages of a book. Typically most locations have some form of written history. ]
Everything? Every single piece is devoid of words?
[ His question doesn't stem from doubt, there would be no reason for this young man to fabricate such a lie, especially when he can make his way towards that newsstand and check for himself. Resolved to continue his search he does ponder out loud. ] That cannot be the sole place with books. There must be some other shop but if not here... [ It would mean leaving the station — which was already in his plans. ]
no subject
Yes. Unfortunate and quite odd.
[It's like some sort of elaborate prank or hoax, but it can't be simply because of just how much resources would be required to pull it off. Even the Winner family for all their wealth, couldn't manage an operation of this magnitude.]
Checking each and every piece would have been an inefficient use of time, but I checked enough to be fairly certain.
[He's been keeping an eye out for any sort of book, file folder, or anything that would usually contain information ever since. No luck. It's quite questionable, really. How a place could suddenly be so devoid of the written word. At least food packaging still had writing on it, which was appreciated. At least that wouldn't have to be a guessing game.
Well, beyond the gamble of is any of this actually safe to consume or not?]
Perhaps there might be something somewhere that's unaffected by whatever this is, I just haven't had the time to find it yet.
[A search like that was the product of days at the very least and not hours. Speaking of, since this is clearly not going to be a short term experience.]
Where are my manners. My name is Quatre Raberba Winner, while I wish we'd met under better circumstances it's still a pleasure to meet you.
[He almost holds out his hand in greeting, but ultimately decides against it. Unsure what sort of greetings this stranger was accustomed to.]
no subject
And as someone who makes it a hobby to play tricks on his dearest friend, the idea that this could be a prank had only briefly crossed his mind only to be quickly dismissed. Not so much because of the complex setup, or due to budgeting issues for such a large-scale scheme but if this was a prank it would be in bad taste and it mostly comes off as malicious more so than fun.
Nodding slowly he accepts the young man's assessment, it's the logical choice surely, especially here. Shelter and other necessities are more important. To most people anyway. Normal people. Reflecting on his own question, he has to stomp down on embarrassment before his face grows heated. ]
Right. Your method is probably best. I might just be a bit stubborn. [ In his search for a good novel anyway. ]
Well, if not here then it's best to keep going. A man grows most tired while standing still.
[ There is something implying an open invitation to join him for the young man who soon offers his name to him. But it seems they've both been lacking in manners, which can be attributed to this whole ordeal... ] But allow me to offer my own apologies, it would appear that I too have neglected an introduction. [ There is a bow. ] My name is Xingqiu, a humble literature enthusiast.
no subject
The occasional trick is enjoyable. One of Quatre's dearest friends is a bit of a prankster, but there's too much about this situation to even consider it one. No, whatever's at work here is surely far too nefarious for that.]
I'd be happy to help you do a more in-depth search at a later time. Statistically it's unlikely, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
[One book out of a thousand with information is still priceless even if it means spending countless hours to find it.]
A fitting proverb for the occasion. I feel the saying It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. is also fitting. I can't imagine our stay here will be particularly short.
[He returns the bow politely, even if the motion is one he's not particularly familiar with.]
No apologies necessary friend, given the situation it's not a surprise to jump straight to the important matters.
[Which for this stranger, clearly involves books. Which, there's nothing wrong with that. Quatre is, after all, quite well read himself.]
I would ask what your favorite works are, but something tells me I couldn't be familiar with anything you might name.
no subject
Again Quatre receives a nod, and again he acknowledges the young man's words. His assessment is once again spot on, but he had labeled himself to be stubborn. He might just be willing to peruse through a thousand books on the chance there is one with information. ]
I've also come to the same conclusion, it's why I resist insisting we search for any valuable tomes. There will be time and there are more important things to seek.
[ That does indicate he feels they must get moving, even if the search for information must be slowed — even come to a stop — necessities take precedence.
Briefly, he does appear amused. In this case, they both were lax but Quatre is correct. There are other matters to attend to, he just gave greater importance to seeking reading material. Perhaps he is being careless but as ominous as the city may appear no danger has shown itself. There was only that eerie feeling earlier when he initially arrived.
His thoughts are diverted back to the subject of books when there is an interest shown in the books he favors. ]
Even if that's the case, I don't see the harm in sharing.